Pizza!

I thought this post worthy of copying over to this blog from AFM menu, plus it might inspire you to try and make your own pizza at home

Well, we have finally done it!  We have the cheese, extra pans, time, and oven space all at the same time so now we can finally get a 'Pizza! Day' underway...

Last Friday night we had pizza on the menu and I made sure I had enough crusts not to run out!  We make our own crust and par-bake them beforehand, freeze them till we need them, then pull them just hours before we use them.

Another excellent way to try and get that 'pizza oven' quality crust is to take & make the par-baked crusts into a pizza by adding sauce and all the toppings you want then use a peel, tray, or rack to slide your pre-made pizzas into the oven.  But don't put them on pans!  Cook them directly on the racks of a preheated oven...makes for a great crispy and chewy crust. (if you do try this at home, the caution I would give is to put a tray under the pizza on a lower rack if cheese melting off the side is in danger of falling on your heating element, it will smoke and possibly catch fire)

If you have steam wells or heated chafing dish holders (or more commonly known as a buffet line) we cut the pizzas and slid them on the chafing dish lids.  Because then you can put the sliced pizzas directly over the heat source without making the pizza soggy (This tends to happen when putting them in chafing dishes).  Another good tip is to slide the pizza off of the peel, tray, and/or rack (after taking it out of the oven) slide it straight onto your stainless steel table, and quickly cut it with a cheap round wheel cutter, then slide it back on the lid.  You can use a cutting board if you want, because I know some would argue dulling the pizza cutter or damaging the table (its stainless steel commercial quality, you aren't going to damage this table.  We clean/disinfect the table before getting started and at the rate, we cut and slide pizzas back on the lids you're going to have a hard time with that cutting board staying in place or slowing down the 'flow' of the work.  Plus we have found cutting fresh pizza on the table with a cheap round pizza cutter has the highest success of a 'full' cutting at 'top' speeds. (I recommend using the cutting board at home)

Pizzas done in 10 minutes at 350 Fahrenheit. (the only additional caution I can think of doing this at home is if you do have the heating element that is visible at the bottom of the oven then check and make sure this doesn't burn the bottom of your crust before the 10 minutes expire, if you have a pizza stone then you probably don't need these tips)

The way we come up with these creative ideas that work is by thinking beyond 'this is how we used to do it' and/or  'we can't do it because we don't have the proper equipment ...you would be amazed how much we do with what we have.  And each one on our Galley team has contributed to ideas that have become possible.

A couple of delicious pictures for you to think about...